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Fabric CEO Unveils The New Retail Imperative · The Retail Podcast

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  Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Retail podcast
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  live at NRS. I'm here with Fabric actually
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  one of the major sponsors on on the lanyard.
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  You can see them all around the show, privileged enough to be
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  joined by Mike Micucci, CEO of Fabric.
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  Thank you so much Mike for giving up your.
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  Time pleasure. I'm surprised you've got a voice
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  because now that you've been talking to your customers.
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  Well, hey, it's I've been practising.
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  How about that? So listen, for those who don't
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  know about Fabric, don't mind doing two things for me, he just
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  give us a little bit of background about you how you
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  ended up at Fabric. We're sort of journey here and
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  then maybe focusing on Fabric. Well, yeah.
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  Well, first again thank you Alex for the opportunity and it's
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  been a wonderful NRF here. We we clearly are are being
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  being present that are at Interop.
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  I've been the CEO here about five months now.
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  I'm relatively new to the company.
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  What attracted me, the company was just the amazing platform
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  technology and forward-looking vision as the commerce world's
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  rapidly evolving with the app and things like AI.
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  Yeah, prior to this I was a long time Salesforce executive and I
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  was the CEO of Salesforce commerce father for many years.
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  OK. And it's been an absolute
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  privilege feedback in the commerce world working on
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  leading cutting edge technology and helping companies
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  revolution. So what do you find?
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  So over the last three days, we're coming up obviously to the
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  end of the third day. What's been the thing that's
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  been the top of mind of executives who are coming to see
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  you? Yes.
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  Top of mind is how can they drive fast return on their
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  technology. But you, I mean, companies
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  globally have poor a tonne of money and the technology because
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  of coke, right? And there's quite a bit of
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  hangover on digesting that. So as they look at say, how do
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  we take those investments but turn those into real world
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  conversion results and AOV results and basically get a
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  superior TCO, that's what's top of their mind.
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  Go ahead, help me get to market really quick and realise results
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  And if we can do that, this is not a project we're looking.
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  At, Yeah. And then in terms of customers,
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  they obviously being new, you must have spent the first you
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  know whatever just focused on customer, customer meeting your
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  customers. Yes, what's been an interesting
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  because obviously you come from Salesforce, what's an
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  interesting outcome that you were like, oh, you were
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  surprised by and your customers from their journey of working
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  with Fabric? Here is where I, and this is
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  maybe my call this a humble bride, but we came off a holiday
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  with two things. First of all, 0.
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  Downtime. Yeah.
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  And you know, look, holiday is like the Super Bowl, American
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  term, Super Bowl of the commerce world.
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  Yeah. And you're all hands on deck.
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  You've got, you've been preparing for months.
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  You got everybody there and we went through this seamless.
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  Y'all. This is the beauty of having a
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  built a new stack on, you know, all cloud services on the
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  hyperscalers, in this case Amazon, so that we can scale up.
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  Yep. Well, we need to and we can
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  scale down as the demand, you know, as you go post holiday.
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  Yeah, so 10 issues. That was phenomenal.
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  That makes me breathe easier, makes my customers breathe
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  easier. Stability is first and foremost
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  in customer experience. Number two was just increasing
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  conversion. We saw our investors on average
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  at over 20% year over year conversion and I was like wow.
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  And I asked him a lot about that and there was, it wasn't just
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  one thing at a combination. One, they had just great
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  performance. We have lightning fast API
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  speeds. So that meant that when the
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  shopping people were shopping on our product, they were seeing
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  just really good response rates and we know speed helps improve
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  conversion. It's a flat out industry that
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  everybody every 30% increase in performance, yeah, you see
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  almost up to a 10% increase. So just getting speed and
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  stability, those sound like obvious, but they're the basics,
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  like who wants to shop on a slow place.
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  Yeah, right, where you know things are buggy or what others
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  is getting them a bit back using the back end of our services,
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  things like inventory availability so that you know
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  when you get to a product detail page, you can see what inventory
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  is available, you can reserve that inventory.
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  If it's a backward situation, you give them offer, you can see
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  if there's any availability in the region at your physical
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  store. So now it's not just what's in
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  your distribution centre, but any of the stores all that
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  becomes instantly available. Yeah that helped our customers
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  using best in class services or they didn't even have to swap
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  out the app or the head. Yeah.
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  They just stitched in the services that were helping
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  unlock on incremental going. So those were the things that
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  really surprised me was I knew we were going to do well.
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  I didn't expect to do this well. Yeah.
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  And so NRF here we are talking about through the lens of this
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  customer success, how we can help our customers on that
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  journey. This NRF, we announced our new
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  order management capability. We've built it over the last
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  year with a handful of key design customers.
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  Yeah, it was designed to drive omnichannel retail experience,
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  which is what everybody says. But let me just take a yeah,
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  yeah, yeah. On COVID.
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  Yeah. During COVID, where did all the
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  money go? It went into digital cause
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  nobody could go anywhere. Yeah, alright, we we're all
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  we're out of that. You know we're out of that.
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  We still have issues, but people are back in the source.
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  Yeah. Where are people investing?
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  They're investing in the physical, physical experience.
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  Yeah, but as consumers what do we want?
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  We still want that kind of flexibility on a digital
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  experience, but we also want it when we in the store being, hey,
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  I want to see if inventory is available that my size, our
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  availability or whatever is not there.
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  Can I talk to somebody quickly reserve it, can I ship from
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  store and pick up in store returns?
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  How? How is that presented in in the
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  physical store? Are you?
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  Is it in an app? That Ohh yeah.
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  How does that represent? Well and.
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  You can manifest. Those, those latter shopping
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  experiences are powered by order management system that can
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  handle the order. Yeah.
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  Now if you're a store associate, we have a.
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  We literally have a store app that they can use right to go.
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  And just like. Yeah, it's like it is in store
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  app, yeah. And or if you have a clienteling
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  app, maybe you're using like NAD Mobile or predict Spring, yeah,
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  we because we are services base ahead in the services.
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  Space go on you, so you. Just said right into there and
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  those are great use cases. We want our customers to use the
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  existing tech investments, yeah, but they want to be powered by
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  investing class platform. Again back to lightning fast
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  speed adding new services on Google and that's one of the
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  reasons why I joined this company was look in my prior
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  life is really hard to make incremental changes.
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  Yeah these were these were pretty rigid monolithic
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  platforms. They're worked well in their in
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  their swim lane. Yeah.
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  But the world is changing really quickly and the the founders
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  built this off the premises white why can't every company
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  behave from a perspective like Amazon.
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  These are all Amazon engineers. So Amazon built this web
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  services, you know, all web services and modern so it can
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  react super fast price promotion inventory.
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  Yeah. And that disconnected piece and
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  it's from merchandising to film it.
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  Yeah. So let's take those same
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  principles and bring them to everybody else.
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  So as you see new needs, you can quickly incorporate those
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  capabilities into whatever application that might be your
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  customer service Rep, it might be your in store app, it might
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  be your physical digital store. That's what's so much fun.
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  Being able to, you know, are the possible wherever you need to
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  go. She finds that retailers are
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  worried about in terms of another system that they have to
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  integrate. Is that like what's the barrier
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  then what's the barrier to entry room?
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  People are are having conversations with you.
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  What's? Why do they think they can't
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  use? Fabric.
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  Yeah. Well, I would say, you know, and
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  you take a step back and look at the industry as a whole.
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  Because that's what I'm thinking.
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  I'm thinking that they've got their ERP, they've got.
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  There's so many different systems.
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  Yeah, right. And still when you go and talk
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  to the customer, like it took me 6 months to integrate to TikTok,
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  Yeah, right. I'm so frustrated.
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  All the platforms and I'm guilty of this in my prior life, they
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  are like come to me and use everything for me and then get
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  rid of all the other tech. Yeah, OK, so the barrier, a lot
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  of case is having to switch over from A to B and having the
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  technical expertise to do that. I mean, this is like a lot of.
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  Just absolutely So instead. It's like, look, we'll do it
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  slightly different, use the systems you have them, let's
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  just make them go faster and better and use the underlying
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  capabilities. And with the modern tech today,
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  it's pretty easy to have with all the simple endpoints that
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  you can incorporate in. So that removes some of those
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  barriers to adoption. The second thing is this is
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  really I think the commerce platform for guilty of this is
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  essentially dead. Hey, here's my API's.
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  You go tape, figure it out. You know, we're about customer
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  success. We're about driving conversion,
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  helping you increase average order.
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  So we built these end to end, meaning let's go all the way
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  from the experience, Yeah, help you with your business logic all
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  the way down to the underlying service.
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  So you can go a lot faster versus, hey, you got a great
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  platform, lots of APIs, I'm sure you're pretty smart.
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  Go take those APIs and figure it out later.
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  Yeah, that's not fabric fabric. We're about customer success
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  helping you drive outcomes because in today's world every
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  investment dollar counts has to count for those urgent that our
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  average order value and really stunning custom.
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  Well, I mean look listen for me the future of retail in the
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  sense and some of the themes that I've picked on is, is the
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  fact that inspiration and discovery are now becoming
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  growth engines. But then the systems to support
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  Inspiration and Discovery and store are not there because you
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  know the the consumers left to their own.
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  Final two questions and I appreciate you busy day,
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  something that's inspired you at the show and what, what, what
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  point of inspiration are you going to take away?
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  And then in terms of fabric, when you as CEO looking to the
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  the future, what what do you see in terms of the future?
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  What are the areas that are really interesting?
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  Yeah, well those questions actually are multi part
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  question. Actually, I'm gonna kind of
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  blend together, OK? Right.
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  We are on the cusp of the biggest technology revenues
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  through AI. Yeah, OK.
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  And commerce, there's so many use cases in commerce that have
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  been in the heads of all of these amazing brands and
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  retailers companies globally, but they've just been too hard
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  to do. Yeah, And it's either takes too
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  much labour, I've touched too many systems together and so
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  forth. AI is going to be the biggest
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  unlock for the consumer experience, right?
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  It's gonna touch every app aspect from customer success all
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  the way through to the shopping. Yeah, but you can't do that
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  without the back end being rock solid.
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  Because every commerce experience, I don't care where
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  it comes from, from some combination of product, price,
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  promo, inventory and order. Yeah.
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  And if you can do that and mix and match.com, well, yeah.
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  So what inspires me? The things that I see from the
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  hyperscalers around the advancements.
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  Agnostic or you? We are, we are, we are built on
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  a WS, yeah. But we use, we can use services
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  from other people as needed quickly investor breed a right.
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  So it's not. Yeah.
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  So my what gets me excited is seeing these innovations where
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  AI can build consumer experiences or shopping
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  experiences or BBC at any, just whatever you dream of.
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  Yeah, that is unbelievable. And the advancements you're
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  going to see in search and those are going to unlock the next
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  kind of wave of I think of shopping and whether it's BBC.
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  And that's what gets me excited because as a platform provider
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  and ready to help a lot because you can't unlock them unless you
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  can deliver those combinations, that critical kind of a comic
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  level. So that's what inspires me.
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  Yeah. And in delivering kind of real
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  results versus kind of Fantom, like, yeah, that's a great
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  project. In 18 months, we'll see how it
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  goes. Listen I I totally agree with
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  everything you said and it's really refreshing and nice to
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  hear about the enablement or empower of conversion in store
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  right. Because I think it's just the
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  system challenge in store is is is big and and and I think if
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  you're lucky enough that you were a pureplay online and
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  you've gone into physical and you're building everything from
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  the ground up, whoa, very lucky. But that's not the reality of
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  modern return. And you and I has consumers work
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  were frustrated like I think there's a better way.
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  Yeah, And I think the technology, and This is why I
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  love being a fabric and here to help revolutionise commerce for
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  everyone and let's go. Yeah, Mike, thank you, So.
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  Much Hey, so much fun. Thanks for the invite today.